Growing Up Poor (w/ Yancey Spruill and Susan Nicholas)

We continue to discuss “straddlers,” i.e., individuals who grew up working class but worked their way into white-collar careers.

Yancey Spruill grew up in a rough neighborhood in west Buffalo, NY, where food stamps and eviction were part of his reality. He attended Georgia Tech and earned his MBA at Dartmouth’s Tuck School. Yancey worked on Wall Street for seven years and then took two separate private companies public as their Chief Financial Officer.

Susan Nicholas was raised in an unstable, single-parent home in Morgantown, WV. She earned her MD from the University of Iowa Medical School, completed a general surgery residency at the University of San Francisco, and a cardiothoracic fellowship at Stanford. She also earned an MBA from Emory University. Yet, none of these degrees brought her the validation she was looking for.